Advancing in Building Information Modeling (BIM) Contracting: Trends in the AEC/FM Industry

Abstract

Construction industry has recognized BIM implementation as a best practice that provides a new set of processes and technologies in construction projects. Despite the significant growth in BIM adoption and research on technological aspects of BIM, far too little attention has been paid to research on BIM contracting. So far, two industry leading organizations (AIA and AGC) have developed standard forms of agreement for BIM contracting. However, many projects have incorporated custom manuscripts to satisfy their special contractual needs, but the existing literature has not dealt with these industry-wide trends of BIM contracting. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine custom developed contracts in order to trace the advances in BIM contracting. This research demonstrates that there are several areas of importance in that standard forms have not addressed them. These include but are not limited to (1) requirements for BIM process inputs (e.g. BIM staff competencies), (2) requirements for BIM process management (e.g. BIM quality assurance and quality control, a metric based BIM processing assessment), (3) requirements for information modeling (e.g. landscape, facility management), and (4) requirements for data security (e.g. corruption of files, and data misuse). This study has practical implications for BIM contracting practices and future developments of inclusive BIM standard agreements.